Yesterday’s work, when I look at what I did, shows I was clearly not in my right mind. Okay, so this interests me. This exercise is doing precisely what I wanted it to do: my drawing is direct evidence on whether or not I’m seeing something correctly, which is to say am I seeing what is there?
Yesterday’s study of The Kitchen, was so wildly off the original. My understanding of what I was seeing was basically wrong spacially, and that interests me.
Today I picked Paul Klee’s Cosmic Composition (1919). So Klee wondered if (and I think finally was satisfied it was true) colour and visual composition shared aesthetic qualities with musical harmonics. He was also interested in the relationship between the visual effect of colour field and line. This picture for me today was really helpful in getting insight into what he was exploring.
The underlying grid describes an eye shape. The center portion is a grid of 1/7s (5 x 7) with a top and bottom edge of 1/6s. This could serve a few purposes, such as helping to establish an illusion of depth, the centre of the eye receding from the foreground edges. Once the colour fields on the grid were established, the graphic image of the landscape was superimposed, guided by the shape of the grid components.
In setting up the picture, what Klee could have done is use a view from life (I believe this picture is based on his hometown? Not sure.) and then force the elements he wanted into his 7 x 7 grid, picking out colours perhaps from real life, or working from another schema or pattern/harmony rule he had worked out.
The other thing about yesterday is I had a feeling that I wanted to revisit my previous efforts on this project (especially with yesterday’s disaster). It might be interesting to follow a 10 day cycle, each iteration informing the next, and seeing where this takes me. I could just follow this discipline until I get bored of it, really. Not damning myself to a torturous 10 iterations of identical study, though this too could be an interesting experiment in process.
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